Sunday, March 8, 2020

#10m propagation 8-March

There was less to hear on 10m FT8 compared to yesterday. ZS6BUN was copied a few times but no others from South Africa. Only contact could be made with DF9JS from Germany despite I (well my robot again) have been calling a lot of stations.

It occurs to me that I have been heard on Faroer Isl. again just like yesterday. Strange as my antenna is pointing south. But since I was copied in Scotland as well I think it has to be genuine. Signal at OY1OF was -7dB at 10:13 UTC, the path must have been to be really open.

11 years ago in the previous solarminimum this kind of propation research or probing was something you couldn't even think of. I was just active with WSPR at that time but don't see any posts about using WSPR on 10m from that year. My first post about 10m WSPR was 10 years ago.... WSPR is nice and able to deeply decode signals. But FT8 comes closer to real world signals...and closer the real propagation paths....

2 comments:

Photon said...

Nice! I still hope that, when the solar cycle picks up, maybe more people will set up 10m WSPR beacons. Imagine what we could learn if ham radio was more equally spread around the world, and not the preserve of the rich western nations.

PE4BAS, Bas said...

Hello John, actually it was on FT8 (I'v add some text now). I don't think WSPR is very usefull for (fast, real time) propagation research anymore. But though it is nice to do some very QRP(p) experiments. I could be wrong of course. WSPR is excellent for antenna research btw. 73, Bas